An Exclusive Love

By Bill Perrett

September 11, 2010 — 12.00am

AT THE heart of Johanna Adorjan’s book is a deep understanding of the everyday and the familiar, how life is structured by ordinariness and habit, and how those things persist even through lives marked by trauma and suffering. Her grandparents Vera and Istvan, whose story this is, were Holocaust survivors, Hungarian Jews who eventually fled to Denmark during the 1956 revolution.

Details of how they survived the 1944 German invasion of Hungary are sketchy. Her grandmother seems to have survived the ghetto with a new baby (Adorjan’s father) by using forged papers. Her grandfather was sent to the prison camps at Mauthausen and Gunskirchen. Having been through the horrors of those places and survived typhus, he made it back to Budapest, emaciated and barely recognisable, as the war was ending. Neither ever wanted to talk about their experiences.

We know from the first sentence of the book that Vera and Istvan took their own lives together in 1991. He was terminally ill and she had decided to die with him. What follows is Adorjan’s attempt to reclaim them, or more properly, to understand them for the first time.

As a child, before the act that ended their lives, at once so intimate and so terrible, she found them elusive: ‘‘They seemed to me like film stars, attractive and mysterious, and the fact that they were related to me, were my forebears, made them absolutely irresistible.’’

The recurrent images she uses to evoke them are themselves insubstantial: music, the smoke of cigars and cigarettes, the smell of perfume. In Copenhagen, they lived as they once had in Budapest, as cultured bourgeois, apparently utterly distant from the history that drove them to Denmark.

Mostly, the search is conducted in familiar ways. Adorjan looks up family members and friends of her grandparents and asks for their recollections. Often there isn’t much. InParis, she visits Illi, a distant relation of her grandmother, now nearly 90. Illi lives in an apartment filled with dolls. She remembers Adorjan’s great-grandparents but her memories of what happened in the war are vague and fading, and she is much more interested in the present.

Eventually, after sensing a resistance in an aunt to talking about her parents ‘‘as if they were simply a fascinating couple’’, Adorjan decides that facts are not the point.

Even so, some impressions reveal amusingly human flaws: her grandmother was pushy and something of a cheapskate with presents. There’s a funny story about second-hand tracksuit bottoms.

Adorjan visits Mauthausen, with its infamous Stairs of Death, where prisoners were sent to be worked to death, where unimaginable cruelty was the norm. Her grandfather somehow survived it. But even that history of horror cannot survive the insistent ordinariness of the present. Schoolchildren are laughing, texting each other; the young man who is their guide seems bored and perfunctory. She herself can’t help wondering whether the sunscreen she brought is strong enough.

Adorjan’s most vivid device for capturing her subjects is not the inadequate attempts to uncover the facts of the past but episodes, interspersed regularly, from a detailed reconstruction of her grandparents’ last day together. It’s a risky business.

Too often, imaginative reconstructions of history come across as irritatingly cheap tricks. Here, the writing draws on what she knows of her grandparents’ relationship, of what was left (letters, lists, presents, their dog left with a friend) with simple directness. Adorjan understands the risks; at one stage she pulls herself up: ‘‘No,wrong, that’s just my sentimental imagination.’’

What makes it effective is her understanding that, even — particularly — on a day like this and unlike any other, routine won’t be denied, the baggage and habits and understandings of a lifetime together cannot be abandoned. Vera bakes a cake; her husband can’t decide what socks to wear.

Undoubtedly, some will object that this book romanticises what they view as an immoral act. The ethical status of suicide won’t be decided by this, or any piece of writing, but it is also hardly the point. What is achieved here is a clear, honest and moving account of real lives.